Early Access Review - RailGods of Hysterra

Jason Daniel
Jun 16
3 min read

Developer: Troglobytes Games

Publisher: Digital Vortex Entertainment

Available on: PC (Steam)

RailGods of Hysterra is set in an apocalyptic world, circa 1920, where civilization has been devastated by the arrival of the Great Old Ones. In this game, you and your friends are Dreamers, traveling around the apocalypse on your trusty train that has been combined with the seed of a Great Old One, now known as a RailGod. This game is a typical survival game filled with base building and resource management, then smashed together with a roguelike game for your exploration and combat. The part that makes this game shine and really stand out is the veil of cosmic horror that covers it all.

You start the game in a tomb that you have slept in to ride out the worst of the destruction of the world, and now awake as one of the Dreamers. Your goal is to save the world from the cosmic horrors that are the Old Gods and the mutated beasts, people, and cultists that now roam this desolate representation of a beautifully rendered Victorian era world.

The music is haunting and helps set you up for the vile sounds of the mutants trying to eat your face as you roam around gathering resources to build your traincar base into the best kitchen, garden, and weapon crafting stations you can. Be sure to save space for chests to hold all your loot and maybe even some prisons so that you can capture enemies and feed them to the head and heart of your locomotive, your RailGod.

The combat is less souls-like and more 2000s Megaman, so plan well and stalk your enemies to kill them or be foolhardy and run right into the middle and try to smash them before they smash you. In this game, death is not final; you will just respawn at your RailGod, leaving all of your items in a bag where you were defeated, giving you the joy of a death run every time you bite off more than you can chew. The madness mechanic and its uses make you balance exploration and retreat so that you can power your ascension as a dreamer.

I love the visuals and gathering all the resources to build my base just the way I like it. But, I do wish that the combat was more varied and the enemies had multiple spawn points instead of always being in the same area or following the same path. This was mitigated in part by the inclusion of difficulty sliders in the first post-release patch. In RailGods of Hysterra, you can face the horrors of the Old Gods alone or with a few friends, just remember, no matter how much you and your friends protect each other in Hysterra, outside of the game, in your own dreams, you face the Old Gods and their madness alone.

This game is different in many ways from my normal open-world survival games. It isn’t open-world, you can’t accidentally bring enemies back to your safeish home, and you can’t build a sprawling estate to reign over the dystopian environment with an iron fist. But, the roguelike mechanics, Cthulhu mythos, and visual aesthetic make it a winner and will definitely keep it in the rotation for when I want a little horror and base building. I give it an 8.5/10 and suggest that if you like survival, cosmic horror, and/or roguelike, you give it a shot. Make sure you join the game's Discord too. It has a helpful and chill community, and it lets you communicate with the developers if you have a problem or just want to tell them how great they are doing.